What precisely is an elder, then? An elder is a man who takes your soul and your will into his soul and his will.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov

…the fundamentally intractable problem of any democratic order is, precisely, authority.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

…you shouldn’t hire managers who want to reorg because they read a blog post that said engineering teams work better when structured this particular way or that particular way.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

When you beat up someone physically, you get exercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence (for a review of this evidence, see Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, and Longo, 1991). Furthermore, we make these judgments without being aware that physical attractiveness plays a role in the process.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind